Best movies like Quality of Life

A Nazi spy passes himself off as an optometrist in San Francisco's waterfront district. Someone robs him of his code book, and he must get it back.

A homeless musician finds meaning in his life when he starts a friendship with dozens of parrots.

A blending of documentary and experimental narrative strategies, combining stunning 16mm landscape cinematography with a bold, lyrical voice-over to share two San Francisco stories: the history of the Golden Gate Bridge as “suicide landmark,” and the story of a butch dyke in San Francisco searching for love and self-discovery. The Joy of Life is a film about landscapes, both physical and emotional.

Sugar Bear, a detective from San Francisco, is called down to New York City by their police chief to assist officer Harry Cox. Their mission is to take down the corrupt crime ring controlled by Big Baby Sweets and his two right-hand men, Big Stank and Lil' Poot.

Two cabbies search San Francisco's Chinatown for a mysterious character who has disappeared with their $4000. Their quest leads them on a humorous, if mundane, journey which illuminates the many problems experienced by Chinese-Americans trying to assimilate into contemporary American society.

Garvey is a San Francisco pawnshop operator. His unemployed and criminal friends Dillard, Turtle and Weslake, team up with Boardwalk, a local pimp, to burgle Garvey's shop while the owner is out of town. During the elaborate planning process, Dillard falls for a Hispanic woman, the sister of a friend. Boardwalk is assigned to case a local apartment, where he meets and falls for the maid. Amidst all these romantic hijinks, Weslake puts together a burglary plan, which is executed by the makeshift gang.

This movie chronicles the life and times of R. Crumb. Robert Crumb is the cartoonist/artist who drew Keep On Truckin', Fritz the Cat, and played a major pioneering role in the genesis of underground comix. Through interviews with his mother, two brothers, wife, and ex-girlfriends, as well as selections from his vast quantity of graphic art, we are treated to a darkly comic ride through one man's subconscious mind.

Small-town boy Shawn MacArthur has come to New York City with nothing. Barely earning a living selling counterfeit goods on the streets, his luck changes when scam artist Harvey Boarden sees that he has a natural talent for streetfighting. When Harvey offers Shawn help at making the real cash, the two form an uneasy partnership.

Two San Francisco detectives want to bring down a local hijacking boss. But they'll have to get to him before a hitman does.

Detroit’s story has encapsulated the iconic narrative of America over the last century – the Great Migration of African Americans escaping Jim Crow; the rise of manufacturing and the middle class; the love affair with automobiles; the flowering of the American dream; and now… the collapse of the economy and the fading American mythos.

Growing up in the Mission district of San Francisco, Che Rivera has always had to be tough to survive. He's a powerful man respected throughout the Mission barrio for his masculinity and his strength, as well as for his hobby building beautiful lowrider cars. A reformed inmate and recovering alcoholic, Che has worked hard to redeem his life and do right by his pride and joy: his only son, Jes, whom he has raised on his own after the death of his wife. Che's path to redemption is tested, however, when he discovers Jes is gay. To survive his neighborhood, Che has always lived with his fists. To survive as a complete man, he'll have to embrace a side of himself he's never shown.

An inside look into one night in the San Francisco underground rave scene.

The film follows three young men as they are drawn into lives of crime. Nick (Crowley) uses his entry-level corporate job to commit credit card fraud and deals drugs on the side. K-Luv (Mackie) is a member of the "V-Dubs", an African-American street gang. Lincoln (Leung) is a rising figure in the Chinese mafia. Gentrification forces Nick's family to move out of their home in the Mission District into Hunter's Point where they are harassed by the V-Dubs. K-Luv's side business of selling bootleg compact discs leads him to enlist Nick's help to bootleg CDs and to negotiate a truce with Lincoln. Lincoln conducts an affair with his boss' daughter Angela (Carpio), a Stanford student engaged to a medical student classmate.

In the final days of WWI a shell-shocked soldier must lead a mission deep beneath the trenches to stop a German plot that could turn the tide of the war.

Tweek City is a week in the life of Bill, a potentially closeted, half-Latino, small-time speed dealer in San Francisco's Mission District. Bill is stuck on an endless walk from one empty experience to the next. Only Bill's friend Jerm has the ability to connect and ground him in reality. When Jerm makes an ill-advised stage dive, Bill plunges into a downward spiral that takes him on a nocturnal journey through the streets of San Francisco and ultimately down to Los Angeles where he crashes his high school sweetheart's wedding. From his sleep-deprived, hallucinogenic state, Bill fails miserably in a desperate attempt to reconnect with his first and only love. With nowhere else to go, Bill jacks a car and ends up at the deserted drive-in theater of his childhood where he is forced to confront the ghosts that he had tried to leave behind.

Twelve years ago, a plague swept through, wiping out most of the population; in San Francisco, only 186 people remain. Two of them use jury-rigged batteries to power a camera and make a documentary. We see a variety of approaches to survival, from the artist and engineer who trade for their needs, to the surfers and woodsmen who fish and hunt, to the scavengers, and a communal farm. We also see how the community deals with those who threaten it, and how the youth are growing up with different values from those who knew our world.

Exploring the pre-fame years of the celebrated American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and how New York City, its people, and tectonically shifting arts culture of the late 1970s and '80s shaped his vision.

In this verité-style drama, Anthony, a newcomer to San Francisco, attempts to come to terms with his abusive ex-lover when he strikes up an unlikely friendship with a street hustler.

It’s been two years since his wife’s sudden death, and once-promising young filmmaker Alex Harty has allowed both his life and career to come to a standstill. But after he assaults a Hollywood studio executive, Alex returns to his hometown of San Francisco to reconnect with old friends for a bittersweet odyssey. Even if Alex can manage to run away from his life, will the memory of his late wife drag him back into it?

A New York journalist lies when his fake story about a pimp describes a real pimp up for murder.

Jenny, a deaf runaway who has just arrived in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to find her long-lost brother, a mysterious bearded sculptor known around town as The Seeker. She falls in with a psychedelic band, Mumblin' Jim, whose members include Stoney, Ben, and Elwood. They hide her from the fuzz in their crash pad, a Victorian house crowded with love beads and necking couples. Mumblin' Jim's truth-seeking friend Dave considers the band's pursuit of success "playing games," but he agrees to help Jennie anyway.

A Death Row inmate uses his prison law studies to fight for his life. Based on a true story.

Set against the backdrop of San Francisco’s Chinatown, this cross-cultural biopic chronicles Bruce Lee’s emergence as a martial-arts superstar after his legendary secret showdown with fellow martial artist Wong Jack Man.

The film unfolds in Manila, Philippines, and in the jungles of the island of Boracay on a tropical island in the privacy of living Russian middle-aged man (Alexander Newsky). But the quiet life interrupted by the murder of one of the locals. In order to protect the daughter of the slain Filipino bandits Russian guy have to remember the past, he tried to bury.

Wayne Adams is murdered in a Barbary Coast saloon and gambling hall in San Francisco in 1880, and his sister, Julie, enlists the aid of the district attorney, Michael Lodge, in gathering evidence in which to convict the owner of the gambling house of the crime. In order to do so, Julie poses as a dance-hall-girl, and soon finds herself in a dangerous situation.

A celebrated district attorney reflects on the way circumstantial evidence impacted a famous murder case.

Now known internationally as the world's first "gay hometown," San Francisco's Castro District was a quiet, working-class neighborhood of European immigrants only a few decades ago. In this documentary, the story of the Castro's transformation is told by those who lived it, young and old, straight and gay. It's a tale of social upheaval, exuberant street culture, political assassination, and the inspiring coming-of-age of an entire community an ongoing saga even today.

During World War I, a group of British miners are recruited to tunnel underneath no man's land and set bombs from below the German front in hopes of breaking the deadly stalemate of the Battle of Messines.

Three daughters of a small down pharmacist undergo trials and tribulations in their problematic marriages between 1904 and 1908.

Two young kids in love, one young graffiti artist and the other a foster-child, find trouble on the mean streets on the other side of the river in New York City. Officer Charles Banks finds young Danny tagging subway cars and then catches Teiresa selling drugs for another mislead teen, Kirk. The officer, instead of turning both of them in, gives both teens a chance to make more of their lives together. Changing their ways turns out to be more challenging than first thought.

Adrift in the lush, nocturnal urban landscape of THE GRAFFITI ARTIST, Nick (Ruben Bansie-Snellman) is a post-modern urban hero asserting his anarchistic agenda on the endless maze of virgin exterior walls that comprise downtown Seattle and Portland. For this iconoclastic young visionary, the vast wall surfaces of deserted alleys and train yards are at once a daunting symbol of capitalist oppression and a texturally rich, seamless tableau ripe for exploitation to amplify his artistic dialectic of anger and rebellion.

In a rundown apartment complex in San Francisco's Tenderloin, a septuagenarian seer is waiting for his final message. For decades the eccentric recluse has chronicled the phrases of the Wheel of Fortune and deciphered their hidden meaning - the details of a mission to save his neighbors from their troubles.

The story of Sausalito's houseboat war and the struggle of the people to survive an onslaught by cops, lawyers and courts all stacked against them. Joe Tate and the Redlegs star as the ragtag leaders of the resistance.

An unlikely connection sparks between two creatures: a fiercely independent stray kitten and a pit bull. Together, they experience friendship for the first time.

Chinese merchant Wing Lung and Elizabeth Mendall, an American, marry and have a son named Jang Lung. Because Elizabeth wants Jang Lung to be raised as a Christian, Wing Lung locks her in the cellar and she becomes insane. Jang meets Marcell Matthews at an Eastern university, and she returns with him to San Francisco to be married.